NASA’s big news: bacteria that use arsenic instead of phosphorus.
Meh.
It’s interesting news, to be sure, but certainly overhyped. It’s counter-productive to try to make a big public deal out of something that assuredly *will* *not* interest the public.
Now that NASA is out of the “boldly going forward” business, they have to hype whatever they can to try to seem relevant.
And so it begins: near-naked TSA searches.
A woman in a wheelchair wearing only her bra and panties in hopes of preventing an intrusive search by Transportation Security Administration employees missed her flight Tuesday at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.
The woman in question is the remarkably well-preserved 52-year-old former surgeon, Tammy Banovac. Though in the video she does look more than a bit like a Stepford Wife, this may be due to being completely PO’ed.
[youtube 4zFi18ioqYk]
See, this is what I’m talkin’ about…
The Irish government has been given a stark warning from some of the biggest American companies in Ireland on the risk of a mass exodus if the country’s low corporation tax rate is raised.
A lesson the Irish should take to heart from America. If our corporate tax rates weren’t so damned high, none of these companies would have moved to Ireland. If Ireland raises their corporate tax rates, the companies will pull up stakes and move again, perhaps to India or China. It’s sad when China is a better place to do business than the Western countries, but the West has only itself – and its greedy collectivist governmental systems – to blame.
The Bbc has released some footage taken from an airship flying low and fast over the French countryside just after The War To End All Wars (Part 1). Wow. They made a bit of a mess.
THIS is the sort of bullcrap I’ve been talking about:
One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans
At the heart of the controversy over “body scanners” is a promise: The images of our naked bodies will never be public. U.S. Marshals in a Florida Federal courthouse saved 35,000 images on their scanner. … According to the TSA—and of course other agencies—images from the scanners are “automatically deleted from the system after it is cleared by the remotely located security officer.” Whatever the stated policy, it’s clear that it is trivial for operators to save images and remove them for distribution if they choose not to follow guidelines or that other employees could remove images that are inappropriately if accidentally stored.
Awesome.
http://johnnyedge.blogspot.com/2010/11/these-events-took-place-roughly-between.html
Read this. If you ever plan on flying again, read this. And hope that this may help change things.
Basically, a guy is facing a $10,000 civil suit for refusing to be sexually assaulted.
If there’s one government program that proves that “land of the free” is not an accurate description of America, it’s property tax. It proves that nobody actually, trully own the land that they think they own… they’re just renting. Even if the land was purchased by an ancestor centuries ago and handed down from generation to generation, the local government still thinks that *they* own it.
As one example of a great many, read through this story.
Short form: a 71-year-old woman has a tax dispute with the town of Redding, Connecticut. Reddings response? Foreclose on 2 of her 8.5 acres, and sell them to someone else. It just so happens that those two acres contained her driveway, and it just so happens that that the someone who bought it put a chian across it and dug a trench. So now, the fuel oil truck can’t get to her house to bring her heating oil, she can’t get deliveries of hay for her horses, she has to walk through the woods to get to her car to drive to chemotherapy.
Now, it could be that the woman is massively at fault here, and has spent her life being a pain in the ass to everyone around her and racking up enemies left and right. Who knows. But the thing to note is… the town of Redding essentially stole her land and sold it to someone else.
If an American cannot be secure in their own home… where can an American be secure? If you’ve bought something, it’s *yours,* damnit.
There’s justifiable outrage at “child soldiers,” then there’s the sort of hysterical whining on display here:
http://www.thisisplymouth.co.uk/news/Cadets-parade-hit-rifle-ban/article-2842270-detail/article.html
ARMY cadets in Plymouth have been banned from carrying rifles in public just days before they were due to take part in a Remembrance festival.
The children had spent weeks practising rifle drill for a display at the Plymouth Pavilions tonight.
But this week they were told by their top brass that the rifles had to go.
Devon Cadet Executive Officer Major David Waterworth told The Herald yesterday that the Plymouth cadets had been ignoring a national ruling.
“It isn’t a new regulation. It’s been in force for about ten years, ever since the UK signed the agreement against using child soldiers.
“There is no need for children to appear in public with weapons. It does upset some members of the public.
“There is no need for it. It doesn’t reflect our aims and ethos in the Army Cadet Force.”
Note that the article doesn’t seem to give the ages of these “children.” Could be 17, for all I know. But even if the cadets are 8… so what? Training with firearms is something that should begin early. Your average gun shop in Utah has a section devoted specifically for kids, typically bolt-action .22 rifles, scaled down appropriately. If there are some members of the public who are upset at the sight of cadets carrying rifles… man the hell up, Nancy, and get yourself some insensitivity training.
A cell phone video of a teacher having a violent mental breakdown in class:
http://www.newschannel5.com/Global/story.asp?S=13294058
The teachers career is almost certainly over. I’ve no idea if, before this, he was a good teacher or bad, popular or unpopular, skilled or incompetant. But going violent is unacceptible.
However, there is another side to this story. Along with the teacher going gonzo… there are the students in the video who are clearly uncivilized. My suspicion is that years of being forced to deal with the worthless detritus of society, with no practical means of enforcing discipline, led the teacher to his breakdown.
As I’ve mentioned before, in my view compulsory education should not be through 12th grade, but only through 6th grade or so. The jackholes shown in this video are precisely the kind of students who would be happier out of school. The jackholes shown in this video are precisely the kinds of students who would make the *other* students happier if they were out of school.
The dirtmonsters who seem to have driven this teacher over the edge have not only ruined the teacher life, they’ve done pretty good damage to their own, and have probably made a sizable dent in the lives of the kids in the class who might’ve actually been able to benefit from the education they might have otherwise received. The teacher, students and school would all have been much better off if the teacher had had the ability to fill out a slip of paper and have troublemaking students simply ejected from the school grounds, via either “bouncer” or “catapult.”